eggleston and the south

The book I'm writing begins in the 1960's South and so I have been collecting photographs and ads from Life's hanging around Salvation Army's, etc. for inspiration. Artistically, I keep coming back to William Eggleston. He brought respect to the color form and hails from Mississippi though he lives in Memphis now from what I gather. The photos he takes are so moving because they feel like so much of my childhood. When I think of growing up in a small town, I think of the subjects of Eggleston's photos: boys who gathered grocery store carts, the sprawl of overgrown fields, and perfectly coiffed old women. I lived in Alabama for seventeen years but hustled Christmas visits haven't given me an image of what it's like now, what still remains. I do notice a new strip mall every time I go home and that all but one Dairy Queen has gone out of business. It took about ten years, but I am deeply missing it. There is an anthology of the best Southern stories which comes out annually and in the 2008 edition ZZ Packer says in her introduction, "the sit-ins, the marches, the hope of better days…began in the South. Every other region can jam its fingers in its ears and shake its head and tunelessly chant 'Not in My Backyard,' but not so in the South. The South is the backyard. And as backward as we've been portrayed—or as backward as we've sometimes portrayed ourselves, slipping behind a curtain of innocent and naïve agrarianism, rural somnolence, and sleepy everlasting vowels—the truth is that every awful and beautiful thing that has happened in America happened in the South first."